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New Ideas for the Enlightenment

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Today we value ideas like freedom, progress, happiness, and human rights. But people didn’t always think they were important.

These ideas came out of the Enlightenment. Scientists led the way in the 1600s and 1700s, and then thinkers in other fields came up with new ways of looking at the world. Two philosophers in England had very different ideas about the nature of human beings. In France, some philosophers said people could use reason in all parts of life. An Italian thinker pushed to improve the way we approach crimes and justice. These people brought big changes to the way governments worked and how people lived in the Western world.